Motherest

by Kristen Iskandrian

  Dear Mom,

  Joan, my friend who works in the music library and actually reminded me of Joan Baez before I knew her name was Joan, tells me that when she wakes up, she lies in bed until she gets a clear vision for the day. She says that she can always tell what kind of day it will be. She says she likes knowing that it will be a shitty day, for example, because then she can spend all of her resources trying to fight the shittiness, or she can just give herself over to the shittiness, confident either way that she’s communing with the soul of the day. She can be prepared. She says because of this she is rarely surprised by any outcomes. And because she is rarely surprised, she is rarely disappointed. Saddened, maybe, when she can’t reverse the shittiness, but not given over to the “why mes/why nows/life is so unfairs.”

  Joan meets me after my work shift ends or I meet her at the music library. The other day we had a bona fide picnic, the grass’s dampness leeching through the blanket she’d brought, us shivering over our sandwiches and bags of chips. Joan grew up on an organic farm and was homeschooled until college. She told me that her parents taught her that it was relatively useless to call life any adjective—unfair or beautiful or unpredictable or anything else. Life is just life, they’d say. There is nothing it is not. She uses a lot of nature metaphors. Like, plants don’t console themselves if they die of late frost. They just die. There’s nothing to feel too bad about. Feeling bad implies that the frost and the death are somehow our responsibility.

  Yeah, I said. But plants don’t have feelings. People do. You can’t blame people for exercising the feelings they’ve been given. You can’t attach to nothing. We’re meant to attach.

  I guess, Joan said. It’s just that any happiness that comes from that always gets fucked up. The only lasting thing is solitude.

  I think Joan has a crush on Tea Rose. And I think Tea Rose is mesmerized by Joan. I think Surprise would hate her. They haven’t met. I still barely see Surprise. I can’t keep track of whether she’s fighting with her boyfriend, or if everything between them is swell. Their status seems to change a lot, but he is still her main focus, like a second curriculum or a marathon that needs to be constantly trained for.

  Tea Rose and I are back, more or less, to where we were before the Simon floodgates opened. Neither of us has spoken of it since. We have gone over to Joan’s house a couple of times, to drink wine and listen to music. I like being around her when he’s there and being around him when she’s there. It’s like our relationship or whatever it is has another dimension to it. Or another person in it, I guess. All of us conductors, sparking.

  I am trying to decide what to do for spring break. Tea Rose is going to London with his family and told me his parents would probably pay for me to come, which seems insane but also incredibly sweet. What on earth, I wonder, has he even told them about me? Joan is staying here and told me I could stay with her, since her roommates are going home and the dorms will be closed. So far that seems to be my best bet.

  Dad has not been pushing me to come home. He asked me on the phone the other day, “Will you come home?” I said I wasn’t sure, and he said to keep him posted. He sounded distracted, like he was watching TV, but there was no noise in the background. I pictured him hearing something and thinking it was you pulling into the driveway, you putting your key into the lock—I imagine one of his ears is always listening for such sounds. I feel so sorry for Dad that it’s hard to even think about him. It’s much easier to wait for you from far away.

  From far away,

  Agnes

  Joan’s house is quiet. Spring break is quiet. Campus is empty, buildings locked, trees weary with the rain we’ve had for the past two days. The streets are beginning to lose the snow they’ve been lined with for months. Surprise’s boyfriend is spending part of the week with her and her family. I am sleeping in one of Joan’s roommate’s beds, using Joan’s heavy, sticker-covered laptop to work on my papers.

  It feels a little like we are married, playing house. In the evenings, we make dinner. While we cook, we drink shitty wine. And after dinner, we drink more shitty wine and listen to music up on the landing outside Joan’s bedroom. Despite having the whole house to ourselves, we tend to cluster together up there, lying on the floor or leaning into one another or sometimes, inexplicably, holding hands.

  During the days, we do different things. I work on my papers. Joan goes for long early morning walks and takes heavy naps in the afternoons. Sometimes she makes food from scratch that most people buy at the store: yogurt, bread. She says she misses the farm.

  “There are things you learn on the farm,” she says, “that you can’t learn anywhere else. Not college. Not through, like, jobs or whatever. Not ‘on the street.’ It’s constant life and death. Things blooming or being born, things dying.” She is drinking from a big mason jar, lemonade she made earlier. She takes a big swig. “And everything has a purpose; everything can be used. Nothing gets thrown out. I mean, even animal shit has a purpose. My mom, she keeps apple cores, uses them to make vinegar.”

  I nod. What she’s saying seems familiar. Things I know but never learned or experienced. What is that called? Intuition? Still, I want to be encouraging. “I loved Little House on the Prairie when I was a kid,” I say. Joan laughs so hard she gets tears in her eyes. I laugh too. There is an ease between us, and the shape this ease takes most often is laughter. To be with her is to admit a certain obsession I have with sameness, no matter how I might deny it. I want my double, and Joan’s essence is a gentle and surprisingly satisfying refusal of that need.

  I don’t mention my birthday until the evening of my birthday. I wake up feeling nothing, and then, remembering my birthday, force myself to feel something. Last year of my teens, I tell myself. My favorite number as a kid, I tell myself. The number that always sounded so far off, so exotic, so sure of itself. Here I am—it. I shower and attempt to do something with my hair, which has grown long and scraggly. I find an eyelash curler among Joan’s roommate’s things and use it. We spend the day busy and parallel, reading magazines, doing schoolwork, puttering around. I am not keeping it a secret but I’m finding it hard to say. When was the last time and place, I wonder, where nobody knew my birthday? It seems significant, like some kind of hallmark of adulthood, or an anti-hallmark maybe, some shrug from the universe: “So what? Everyone’s got one. Move along.” When I finally say something, we are in the kitchen, I at the table on Joan’s computer and Joan peering into the pantry.

  “So, it’s my, ah, birthday today.”

  Joan looks at me, puzzled, and then a smile breaks across her face, dimples and crinkles unabashed. “Get out! For real? Nineteen?”

  “Yep.”

  “Let’s go out! I’m taking you out for Chinese food. I was just trying to figure out if we had the stuff to make some kind of lo mein but forget it, we’re going out. We’re getting a scorpion bowl!”

  We walk to Ming’s, which takes a long time, and by the time we get there, we are numb with cold. Joan orders a scorpion bowl and our server, who looks no more than fourteen, doesn’t flinch. We are, the triangle of us, nonchalant—Joan twirling her hair; the boy, expressionless, with no pad to scribble on; and I with my head down, staring at the faux ornate menu, a red binder embossed with gold, the plastic pages inside covered with all-caps English, Chinese characters, and overly lit, garish photographs of slick food tangles. The description for EGG ROLL reads EGG DOUG FILL WITH MINCE VEGETABLS PORK & DEEP FRYED.

  A few heads turn as the scorpion bowl is delivered to our table, snapping and popping with a lit sparkler and festooned with skewered pineapple and drink umbrellas. The bowl is huge. The outside of it is made to look like a pineapple. Inside are ice and bright red punch and four straws, along with the various other accoutrements. Joan eats the pineapple chunks while she orders food for us—vegetable dumplings and vegetable lo mein “and some of those crunchy things, what are they called? Those crunchy chow mein noodles. Those are free, right?” The boy nods just slightly, no
t writing anything down. He leaves, disgusted or entertained or just purely apathetic, we will never know. Joan puts two straws near her mouth and taps the other two my way. “Cheers,” she says, “but first, make a wish.”

  The sparkler has stopped sparkling. A tiny bit of orange glows for a second, then stops. I wish for my mother. My brother. For Tea Rose, that he will not fail me. For good grades, to make my father happy. But mostly, I wish for my mother.

  Before going to bed, I call my dad. “I was hoping you would call,” he says. “I didn’t know how to reach you.” I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. I feel dizzy from booze and MSG.

  “Happy birthday, Agnes,” he says.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “I love you very much and hope all your dreams come true.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  Dear Mom,

  Okay, so you missed my birthday. Let this letter serve as the official record—the first birthday, to my knowledge, you missed completely: no card, no call, no show. I guess I don’t know how to feel about it. It’s like…a newish feeling tossed onto the pile of other, older feelings. A special kind of disappointment. Limited edition birthday disappointment.

  Early morning, hungover, Joan told me about her sister. In return, I told her about Simon. We were in Joan’s bed, making a transaction—trust for trust. Sometimes somebody’s story curls up around your own and bears it out of hiding. What we have in common is not on the surface, but underneath, we are reaching for the same things, bracing ourselves in the same way.

  Turns out, Joan’s sister, who lives with her parents on the farm, is severely anorexic and has been for seven years. It started with a diet, and then a stricter diet, and then it went from there. At some point she overheard the doctor talking about the minimum number of calories necessary to stay alive, and for the past several years she has eaten that many, not a single one more. Occasionally a few less. She was hospitalized for a while but it seemed to make her worse. For a brief spell she lived in a treatment center, but she refused the therapy and group stuff and her parents could not afford to keep her there.

  “She lies in bed,” Joan said, “or she sorts food. She convinces my parents to buy her certain things from the grocery store, promising she’ll eat them, but she never does. In her closet are bags and bags of food. There is one garbage bag filled entirely with those condiment packages you get at fast food places. I have no idea how she got them. Mustard, mayo, ketchup, relish. I found a few whose corners were torn or bitten open. Like she sucked on them a little before putting them back.”

  Joan said it finally dawned on her one day last year or maybe the year before that her sister was not trying to be skinny. “She’s trying to die. But she wants to see how long she can stay right on the edge. It’s like this prolonged prelude to the main event. She thinks she’s doing it alone but she’s taking all of us—me, my parents—with her. It’s been a seven-year suicide. I think she’d be proud to make it a ten-year one, or more. Twenty years. The rest of her life, like this, half dead.”

  Then she was done talking, and it felt so naturally like my turn. I told her about Simon more fully than I’ve ever told anyone, even myself. I told her how you nearly went crazy trying to find out who’d given him the oxycodone—you never did, right?—and how the doctor said that the alcohol was just as much at fault. I told her how I’d wanted to scream that the pills and the booze hadn’t marched into his mouth like an invading army, that the fault was his alone. I’d wanted us to be madder at him, to rage at him together, but you couldn’t, and Dad couldn’t, and I’m beginning to understand why it was necessary for you to look for blame everywhere else before turning it inward. Blaming him accomplishes nothing. Blaming yourself accomplishes nothing, but it’s juicier; there are infinite layers, infinite places to find failure if you look. I know this. I get it now.

  I told her about my memories of him, his laugh, his temper, his love of skateboarding and drawing and music; the times, which I’ve catalogued and canonized, where he sought me out, to talk to or mess with, how cool it felt to be, for those brief moments, his peer, the eight years between us simply dissolving. I told her how now whenever I think about Simon I get an acrid taste in my mouth, the taste of pills melting, as though through some Sisyphean transfer, I have been fated to forever partake in his final deliberate act. At some point Joan brought me a glass of water and held my hand because I was crying, and I told her how you found him in his bed the next day, peaceful as if just asleep but with the note—I LOVE YOU, I’M SORRY, I CAN’T—written on a piece of smudged paper from one of his sketch pads. I told her about the smells and sounds of the house in the weeks that followed, the food people brought over that rotted because no one ate it, the hoarse screams and sobs from behind closed doors, the stringency of ammonia that seemed to be poured everywhere, on everything.

  And then at a certain point I felt quiet filling me like smoke, blacking out whatever words might have been left. “You can’t say it all,” the silence reminded me, and it was a relief to just lie there in the midst of all that was said. Joan squeezed my hand and I squeezed hers back, like an erratic heartbeat between us, or some type of Morse code. The Morse code of just not being alone. Eventually, she fell asleep. In the dim light, her blond dreadlocks looked like fabric, like the tattered yarn braids of a doll.

  It’s crazy to think that every day of life puts us closer to death. I mean, it’s life that kills us. Living is a slow suicide. Time is the pills we take, the calories we refuse to eat. Choosing to stay alive or choosing to die—in the end, the only thing that separates them is a handful of years and the questions we ask that never get answered.

  Right?

  Agnes

  Tea Rose calls Joan’s house from London. I detect a faint accent. I imagine him testing it out privately, quietly, but decide he probably did not do this. The British tilt is probably genuine; he is absorbent.

  “I miss you,” he says.

  I want to think and answer honestly. There is a long pause.

  “You there? I miss you.”

  “Yes, I’m here. I heard. Thanks.”

  Another silence. I expected to miss him. But I realize that hearing his voice now, I am thinking about him for the first time all week.

  “Do you miss me?”

  It’s funny, I think. I want him to be desperate for me. I have not missed him because I have been content. With Joan. A tiny shiver inches down me, like a bead of condensation on a glass, when I think of his body, his hands, his weight. But mostly, I have savored this newish sense of safety, the assurance of being an accounted-for person. There is something I have with Joan, I realize, that I don’t have with Tea Rose. Maybe it’s because with her our bodies stay out of it. Maybe it’s because both of our families operate under a baseline system of fracture and duress, both of our siblings have tested the outer limits of pain. Maybe we really love each other. Maybe she is the first person I find myself loving in this post-Simon, post-mother world. But he is in London, and this call must be expensive.

  “Yes. I miss you.”

  I can hear some movement, the phone being switched from one ear to the other.

  “The week has gone so slowly. I can’t wait to get back.”

  I hold back a noise. The conversation is getting impossible. My week has flown, but I don’t have the energy for another round of this quilting of half-truths from little scraps of guilt.

  “When will you get here?” I will just ask questions, I decide. “Tomorrow?”

  “No, actually. Day after, since I don’t have class.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you then? We’ll hang out?”

  “Definitely. Should I come by your room? Or do you want to meet at mine?”

  My room. Another thing I have not thought about until now. I picture it, dark, my ratty bathrobe hanging limp on the back of the door. Surprise’s left-behind perfume bottles like faithful little soldiers, the whole room waiting to be useful again. I wish I could stay at Joan’s. The thoug
ht of going back to Halsey seems devastating.

  “Yes,” I hear myself say, without knowing which option I’m saying yes to. “What time, do you think?” I want to know how many hours I have left of this other life I’ve so quickly come to prefer.

  “Probably not until late. Eleven, maybe?”

  “I guess come to my room? We’ll figure it out from there.”

  After I hang up the phone, I go once more to the bathroom to check for blood. For days I have been feeling that low churning and, afraid to ruin Joan’s furniture or her roommate’s sheets, I yank my pants down anytime I get behind a closed door. My relationship with my period is like a child’s relationship with losing her teeth—no matter how many fall out, each one is a shock, somehow exciting and a bit disgusting. I know, while having it, that I feel oddly happy, an emotion not neatly capitalized upon by the period industry, which seems hell-bent on reminding women how much there is to be miserable about, urging them to cheer up by smelling better or looking thinner. But I love when the blood comes. I love curling up in a ball on my bed, feeling the ebb and flow of cramps, the intense hugs of pain followed by the succor of no pain. The entire human experience, as performed by my body.

  I look at my watch for the date, but the date is irrelevant because I am, in this regard it seems, among others, irregular. I bled right after Christmas and felt extra relieved, because I felt like, up until that moment of bleeding, that stranger I’d had sex with at the party was still inside me somewhere. So that’s something.

  I get up from the toilet now, stiff from having sat for so long. I wash and dry my hands for a long time, enjoying the warm water and the satisfying little bubbles and the soft towel. I go up to the room where I have been staying this past week, a week that has felt vast and timeless, like an ocean. I think about being back in my own room. I think about seeing Surprise again, seeing Tea Rose, working in the dining hall. It feels like August, like I will have to learn everything all over again.